Whilst much of Mrs. Dalloway is lovingly preserved in Stephen Daldry’s filmic adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours, the film itself is ultimately bleak in tone, and Woolf’s novel, ultimately is triumphant.
KEY SCENES:
1. the final moments (i.e., the party vs the not party)
2. the suicide of Septimus Smith/Richard Brown + Laura Brown’s not suicide
3. the relationship between Clarissa and Peter/Clarissa and Richard
4. the opening scenes? Buying the flowers???
In Stephen Daldry’s film adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s reconfiguration of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, we have both a tribute to the iconic author’s modernist classic, as well as an extension of her vision of life. In the film, as in Cunningham’s novel, the plot of Mrs. Dalloway is splintered across three female leads (including a dramatized Woolf, played by Nicole Kidman) and Daldry tells it through a necessarily visual, external language that nevertheless picks up many of the novel’s recurrent motifs: flowers, water, light and shadow, mirrors, duality, fluidity. With characters variously haunted by and seeking life’s most intense experiences, and parallels abounding between different characters and decades, the film echoes Woolf’s interest in time and change, in life’s pure ‘moments of being’ and the fluidity of human identity, perhaps more authentically than a more literal film adaptation of the novel could. And yet, lacking Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness style, and focussing more pervasively on the limitations of his heroine’s experiences, the film is enduringly pessimistic where the novel is hopeful.
The film opens with a dramatization of Virginia Woolf’s suicide in 1941. Images of Woolf loading her coat with stones and stepping out into the river near her and Leonard Woolf’s house in Sussex are juxtaposed with lines from her suicide note: “I fear I am going mad again, and this time I shan’t recover,” and “I don’t think two people could have been as happy as we have been.” Already, The Hour’s grim preoccupation with death is announced, and it is contrariwise to the novel’s apparently optimistic opener, “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” With murky close-ups of the reeds and weeds in the river entangling Virginia’s arms and legs, the troubled author’s sombre, watery death is a deliberate parallel with Clarissa Dalloway’s “plunge” into the June morning in the novel where the “leaden circles” of Big Ben “dissolve in the air”, and it reappropriates the recurring water imagery of Mrs. Dalloway more broadly (for example, Septimus Smith’s suicide– another “plunge”, or Clarissa’s wave-like meditations whilst sewing her green dress). Of course, Clarissa Dalloway’s mundane venture into the June morning is not wholly upbeat; it is complicated by the contradictions and taboos of the society – and the self – she inhabits, but it is still essentially a creative enterprise. Moreover, where the aquatic imagery is in Woolf’s novel entwined with the fluid rhythms of life, and indeed her own writing – the ebb and flow of ideas and perceptions, of singularity and dissolution, of consciousness and unconsciousness, and yes, of living and dying – in the film it is symbolic more singularly of the blurred boundary between life and death. In this Daldry is consistent – throughout the film, it is only at moments where the solidity of life gives way, or threatens to, to the dissolution of death that water imagery recurs: Virginia’s “bird-funeral” with Vanessa’s children by the river, or the impressionistic flood of Laura Brown’s near suicide, or even the dying Richard’s blue robe and dark, murky apartment. Thus, we can observe the film’s focus on the limitations of life, of life ceding to death, tragically (with a stirring, insistent Phillip Glass soundtrack), whilst the novel is concerned with the interconnectedness of all things, of life and death, retreat and renewal, contraction and dissolution. And more so, we can note that even in the use of a very fluid visual motif – water, for the filmmaker the meaning is largely concrete, codified, fixed, and for the author, whose use of metaphor is not external but integrated into her own language, her characters’ ‘stream-of-consciousness’, it becomes part of the very fabric of the reality she is describing, one in which leaves “drag their leaves like nets through the air” (as they seem to do to Septimus), in which the folds of a dress “collect, overbalance, and fall; collect and fall” like waves, and a June morning is something one dives into.
As the film progresses, we see elements of it’s namesake novel (Mrs. Dalloway was originally to be called The Hours) reconstituted across the 1950s through Laura Brown, the 2000s through Clarissa Vaughn, and the 1920s through the fictionalised Virginia Woolf. Here, the use of parallel storylines and converging plot is amplified and expanded from the novel: each woman is in some way preparing a party; there is a rebellious, forbidden kiss in each decade (in Vaughn’s case an echo of an earlier kiss). And particular characters in each era strive to overcome the re strictions of their circumstance through art, or through the domestic arts available to them (i.e., cake-baking). The film essentially employs the same structural devices Virginia Woolf does to “dig out beautiful caves behind [her] characters” and reveal the connectedness of human experience beyond their distinct, isolated stations in social life, or more pointedly in The Hours, in time. The abrupt juxtaposition of different decades throughout the film is smoothed by shared motifs, such as flowers, mirrors, or repeated dialogue, hinting at the underlying continuity, rather than difference in times. Also, as much as in the novel, the various plots of the film converge upon Clarissa’s party – as Vaughn’s daughter, Julia quips, “All of the ghosts are assembling for the party”. Even the fictionalised Virginia’s work is alluded to by both Clarissa Vaughn and Richard Brown directly before Richard’s suicide, and the bereaved Laura Brown meets with Clarissa and stays with her and Sally on the night of the scheduled party. Significantly though, in Daldry’s film, there is no party, or at least, no party for “Mrs. Dalloway.” It is circumvented by Richard Brown (the counterpart of Septimus Smith, more than Peter Walsh)’s suicide. This is a key difference between the texts, and can be interpreted as the film’s subtle sympathy with Richard’s criticism of Clarissa’s Vaughn’s life as consisting of “trivial things, you know, details.” Clarissa’s party, supposedly prepared for someone else, like Laura’s cake, is derailed by the ailing poet’s more honest, pure decision to face reality and accept death. We are led to believe that by caring for Richard, and holding onto the past too tightly, Clarissa has been avoiding her own life, that she has not been brave enough to “think of [her]self” as Richard does, or – at great cost – does Laura Brown. But by contrast, in Woolf’s novel, the party is the natural culmination of her character’s drive for renewal. It is a success. And certainly, like Clarissa Vaughn, Mrs. Dalloway is criticised for being too trivial, labelled the “perfect hostess” by Peter Walsh, yet the novel as a whole does not entirely endorse this view. Instead, she is a magical feat, making “an enchanted garden” out of “a few fairy lamps… in the back garden,” and delivering her whole, renewed to Peter and Sally Seton, eliciting “terror”, “ecstasy”, “excitement”, for, simply, “there she was.” Rather than derail her party, the suicide in the novel leads Clarissa Dalloway to accept that she “was never wholly admirable”, that she is “scared” and somehow “disgraced” by the young Septimus’ death, but that she can and must continue her own life – “she felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away while they went on living.” Now Richard Brown’s suicide does prompt Clarissa Vaughn to appreciate her own life more, an idea that is extended in The Hours with Laura Brown’s sad tale of abandoning Richard as a boy. As such, we leave Clarissa kissing Sally on the lips – one of the few moments of intimacy between the two in the film. We can assume she feels somewhat similarly to Clarissa Dalloway. But with the dim, shadowy lighting of these closing scenes, with the “crab thing” tossed into the bin like Brown’s first failed cake, Daldry presents a grimmer picture of life moving onwards, and calls upon his characters to make much tougher choices if they wish to “look life in the face” as Woolf intones in her suicide note, quoted again finally, dovetailing the bleak film. |